The First Time Is a Charmer

Wednesday

PARIS — Tweet the message from Paris to Shanghai: The Louis Vuitton show on Wednesday was a success, for its modernity, its clarity, its decency ... and its respect for women.

Oh! And its bags. Those front-row few who already had first dibs were showing off lipstick-red boxes with gilded LV trunk fastenings and three curving, white X kisses.

“Louis Vuitton belongs to everyone,” Nicolas Ghesquière, the label’s new creative director, said of his debut collection. “It is that kind of name that has so much language. My vision was of a leather coat and to narrow it down to create a wardrobe.”

The designer, 42, was cheered to the rafters of the bare warehouse structure, where the geometry of horizontal stripes across window blinds set the tone — so different from the extravaganzas of escalators or steam trains installed at previous shows by Marc Jacobs, who preceded Ghesquière at the label. The new collection was a piece of fashion architecture, drawn firmly on straight lines, each sharp top, maybe with a deep décolletage or upturned triangle of a skirt spelling out the letter V.

But was that a V for victory? Ghesquière did a good job in his first outing, although a lot of it followed his previous style at Balenciaga, with the angular cuts transmuted to the leather that is at Vuitton’s soul. He also introduced some techno fabrics, another of his fashion fetishisms. And the color palette that he called LV central, with sky blue, brown and orange, mixes the favorites that the designer has long drawn from his childhood in the 1970s.

“It’s perfection, very him, very Vuitton and very me,” the model Natalia Vodianova said of the collection, while the artist Cindy Sherman said, “It made me want to go shopping.”

Desire: that emotion is the holy grail of fashion shows, so it was no wonder that Bernard Arnault, chairman and chief executive of LVMH, called the collection “formidable.”

The plus points were evident. The look was modern and streamlined, with just a few glancing references to the exotic, travel side of Vuitton in an Indian flower pattern or sweaters with a Nordic decoration. Accessories were also geometric: earrings as metallic circles and boots in beige calf with a fan of black spokes at the ankles. The bags followed similar lines in a crisscross of white-on-black that the designer said was, historically, the interior pattern of LV bags.

The cut was impeccable, with all the proportions from jacket lengths through raised-waist skirts to skinny pants justly aligned. And the focus on leather, as soft as butter, was purposeful.

What was missing was any pulsating sense of change. And maybe that was right. Ghesquière did not set out to rock the boat, but rather to turn it in a different direction. All the signs are that he is heading to the right place, at the right time.